For example the download page is something people expect, yet it is
confused. We have mirrors, do we still have them?

I am the perpetrator of the (rather horrible!) PHP hack used in this page.

The mirrors were always a bit problematic - even then, some of the alleged
mirrors didn't work, and those that did often didn't get updated with the
latest changes until long after they had happened. The mirrors were
important because, at that time, the GNUstep site had very limited
bandwidth and people were encouraged to use mirrors instead. I think this
problem is historical.

The idea behind the way it is done is that the user can select their
preferred mirror initially and it is then used for all their downloads
from that page. I think that offering a per-package choice of mirror would
be (slightly) more confusing for the user - having to think about 'what
packages do I want?' and 'where can I get them from?' at the same time -
and would clutter the information on the page. However the best solution
might well be simply to drop the mirrors.

On the general questions, some feedback from a few years ago when I
advertised a set of GNUstep packages on the SuSE newsgroup:

- the NeXT 'look and feel' was of interest to at
least some people;
- there were complaints about the 'old-fashioned'
default appearance of GNUstep and the (then) lack
of ability to customise it;
- there were complaints about the apparent lack of
integration between GNUstep and the WindowMaker
window manager.
--
Richard Stonehouse